Afghanistan's freedom fighters

She is as articulate as she is cautious with her life. Raihana Azad, 28, had the courage to break the Afghan mould. When the foreigners came, she worked for the United Nations; and when parliament came, she ran for public office.

But now she hunkers in Kabul, the target of too many death threats to ever return to her home province - except when she can fly into a foreign-controlled military base and is accompanied to meetings by an Australian military escort, bristling with weapons.

But it seems that danger lurks in the capital too, so she treads her political path carefully.

She argues that in some ways an MP has more power in Kabul than does a provincial powerbroker back in Tarin Kowt. ''I keep myself in a way that is not too close to them and not too far from them,'' she says. ''They tell other MPs who and what to vote for, but I ignore them.'' She refuses to stay overnight in her home province.

The menacing phone calls are so frequent that she is constantly changing her mobile phone number - ''They're a daily occurrence.'' By Western standards, Azad is a well-adjusted young woman getting on with her life, her work and studies. But in her homeland, she is an outlier. Which tribe she is from? Her answer makes a curt political point. ''I'm an Afghan. I don't like that question.'' Married?

Her nonchalance becomes quite shocking. ''Divorced. We split before I was elected to parliament.'' Kids? Don't go there.

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When she was first elected the calls for her resignation and her death were troubling. ''They wanted to kill me and my family, for allowing me to stand for parliament. I stayed in Oruzgan on the day the results were released. Just as well I took the precaution of staying with friends; they searched four different houses looking for me, and they would have killed me.

''I spent two days hiding in a basement. Then I changed into old clothes and a burqa and travelled to Kabul, under a false name. It's too dangerous to tell my family when I'm going home because the callers always tell me what my movements have been to let me know they are watching.'' Recently, she said, three ministers of the Karzai government were required to travel to Oruzgan to check progress on several public works projects, but they refused to travel unless she accompanied them. ''We got to Tarin Kowt but we were unable to leave the governor's compound to go to the project sites because of the security situation,'' she says.

No hiding place: Raihana Azad in her office in Kabul always has to watch her back. Photo: Kate Geraghty

Her hope is for Afghanistan to be a democracy in which an individual's humanity is of more value that their tribal connections.

But she turns on the country's president, accusing him of tampering with the election laws - again. ''[Hamid] Karzai will bury democracy as we're coming to know it,'' she says, revealing far more hair than most Afghan women would dare and flashing pale-pink fingernails as she perches on the edge of an over-stuffed armchair. ''Women will suffer, but it will be good for warlords and the drug barons.''

Outside, it's snowing. Inside, Hilla Achekzai takes no chances - bundled up in a scarf and a heavy coat, she bathes in the eerie orange glow of a fan heater that sits on her desk in Kabul's Parliament House.

She's a senator. And her name is confusing; she is actually of the Ahmadzai tribe, but she has taken the name Achekzai to honour her late husband who was of that tribe.

She stabs at her mobile phone, diverting a stream of calls. And before she dares to discuss the brutal depths of politics and policy in Oruzgan, she pauses to eject all the men from her crowded office.

She berates the provincial leadership for failing women, saying that in the lead-up to the last elections she focused electoral awareness among women in Oruzgan, for which she was threatened with death, specifically by beheading.

''Our presence as women MPs in Kabul is kind of symbolic, but the truth is we get no support and we're not liked,'' she says. ''Of the tribes, the Barakzai are totally against any advancement for women, but at least the Popalzai flatter us; we get lip service from them.'' She had ventured to Oruzgan a few weeks before we met late in January, but it became a fraught business.

''I flew to Kandahar and drove north to TK by road, wearing a burqa for the whole journey. And I had to keep it on in my village and in Taren Kowt town. The governor says that if I don't wear it, I might get shot.''

Are we to read from this that little has changed for women after coalition forces have been on the ground for more than a decade? She mentioned earlier that many homes now had a sewing machine, as though the acquisition was a measure of progress in women's rights. But now she replies, ''The reality is that virtually nothing has changed.''